Climate Progress

The IPCC’s official total temperature increase since 1850 has gone from .6° Celsius to .76° C (or about 1.4° Fahrenheit).

The Fourth Assessment also explains that, “For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2° C per decade is projected for a range of [emission scenarios]. Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about .1° C per decade would be expected.”

Their best estimate for a low emissions scenario is still a temperature increase of 1.8° C by 2100. Their best estimate for a worst case emissions scenario projects 4.0° C–and recent research suggests that would give us sea level rise of 6 inches a decade in 2100.

Whaddya say we try to stick with the low emissions scenario?

While Bush talks a good game on energy security, he doesn’t back the rhetoric up with action. That is especially true when it comes to his own budget, as made clear in a press release from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy:

President’s Budget Undermines Energy Security

Washington, D.C. (February 6, 2007): The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) today issued a preliminary assessment of the Administration’s FY 2008 budget request, finding that the request continues to shrink funding for the energy efficiency programs that should be front-line priorities in the nation’s energy agenda.

“The President can’t increase our energy security by continuing to cut the clean energy budget,” said Acting Executive Director Bill Prindle. “This request should be dead on arrival in Congress, because it cuts 2007 spending for efficiency and renewables by 16%, and the efficiency budget alone could fall by up to a third.”

The total FY 2008 request for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the Department of Energy is $1.236 billion. The funding level of FY 2007 for EERE is $1.473 billion based on Congress’ recent continuing resolution decision. Thus, the request represents a $237 million (16%) cut from 2007 levels.

The request also sacrifices important efficiency programs to fund a few Administration priorities. For example, low-income weatherization is cut $98 million, industrial efficiency programs $13 million, vehicles technologies $3 million, and federal energy management $3 million in order to support increases in hydrogen ($59 million), solar ($66 million), and biomass ($90 million). The request also cuts about $46 million from distributed energy systems in the Office of Electricity budget. All of these comparisons are from 2006 levels as DOE’s program allocation for the 2007 budget has not yet been released.

The vehicle technologies program is the home of work to move forward on hybrids and diesels, and to increase heavy truck efficiency. These are the steps that can move us toward oil security in the next decade, yet the Administration proposes no additional funding for the program.

“Efficiency is the first fuel in the race for energy security,” Prindle added. “If we don’t get our energy demand under control, none of the President’s or anyone else’s clean energy proposals will be able to catch up.”

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing energy efficiency as a means of promoting both economic prosperity and environmental protection. For information about ACEEE and its programs, publications, and conferences, contact ACEEE, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 801, Washington, D.C. 20036-5525 or visit http://aceee.org.

According to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, “discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns.”

The increases in oceanic temperature are particularly worrisome: “Observations since 1961 show that the average temperature of the global ocean has increased to depths of at least 3000 m and that the ocean has been absorbing more than 80% of the heat added to the climate system.”

As the oceans warm, they expand, and they provide fuel for more intense tropical storms. Also, warmer oceans “reduce… [their] uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide, increasing the fraction of anthropogenic emissions that remains in the atmosphere.” Less and less will we be able to rely on the ocean to naturally absorb carbon dioxide–one explanation for the accelerated growth in CO2 concentrations in recent years.

Unrestrained Emissions + Feedbacks + Less Oceanic CO2/Heat Absorption = Incalculable Warming…

ClimateProgress’s very own Kari Manlove has a terrific article in Campus Progress. You can read it here!

The IPCC Fourth Assessment is out, as is news of the political process and “last-minute wrangling” that gave us the final product.

Two topics were especially controversial. The first is the relationship between hurricane intensity and climate change. Predictably, the U.S. lobbied for weak language on the topic. One blogger on RealClimate notes that Europe’s news coverage hardly emphasizes the point. Or is that because Europe isn’t hit by hurricanes?

Second, the IPCC models leave out significant melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, as ClimateProgress has noted and RealClimate also observed. As Drew Shindell, from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, put it:

The melting of Greenland has been accelerating so incredibly rapidly that the I.P.C.C. report will already be out of date in predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much worse than is predicted in the I.P.C.C. report.

While the Fourth Assessment is a valuable contribution, it is still a conservative, already-out-of-date summary targeted at policymakers, who aren’t as easily pushed into action as, say, the melting glaciers.

Joseph Romm, author of Hell and High Water: Global Warming, The Solution and the Politics, called the report “solid and scary.”

Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank, said a standout concern for the USA is the finding that climate change is likely to raise the intensity and rainfall from hurricanes and other tropical cyclones, a point of great debate since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and the onslaught of storms in Florida in 2004.

That makes the report’s discussion of sea-level rise “disappointing,” Romm said, because it narrows and lowers the expected range of the oceans’ rise even as recent research shows Greenland and Antarctica losing masses of ice that could raise the world’s waters.

Romm said recent sea-level science not included in the report because it came out after the deadline of more than a year ago suggests a 5-inches-a-year rise after the year 2100, “which is devastating. How do you adapt to that? We’re going to have to triage a lot of major cities here, particularly when you throw in the increased intensity and increasing rain events” of hurricanes.

This analysis suggests that the United States could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by between 10 and 40 percent of the 1990 level at very low cost. Some reductions may even be a net savings if the proper policies are implemented.

–U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1991

What are the winning strategies for avoiding climate catastrophe, for avoiding Hell and High Water? This chapter examines the solutions for the power sector. Amazingly, with the right technology strategy over the next two decades, we could cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by two-thirds without increasing the total electric bill of either consumers or businesses.

The Summary for Policymakers is here.

There is a bombshell buried in the middle of the IPCC report. So far, it hasn’t received the attention it deserves. In a bullet point on the bottom of page twelve, the report says that dangerous feedback mechanisms are a ticking timebomb, and require dramatic action now.

Translated into plain English, they are saying that we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions far more than previously expected–up to 27% more–or else it will be impossible to deal with global warming because of feedback mechanisms. This is one of the central premises of my book Hell and High Water, and there was little indication this was going to be in the report. It is a meaningful addition.

The key bullet from the report (bottom of page 12):

Climate-carbon cycle coupling is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain. This increases the uncertainty in the trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions required to achieve a particular stabilisation level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Based on current understanding of climate carbon cycle feedback, model studies suggest that to stabilise at 450 ppm carbon dioxide, could require that cumulative emissions over the 21st century be reduced from an average of approximately 670 [630 to 710] GtC to approximately 490 [375 to 600] GtC. Similarly, to stabilise at 1000 ppm this feedback could require that cumulative emissions be reduced from a model average of approximately 1415 [1340 to 1490] GtC to approximately 1100 [980 to 1250] GtC. {7.3, 10.4}

A quick report from Paris:

The most authoritative report on climate change is using the strongest wording ever on the source of global warming, saying it is “very likely” caused by humans and already is leading to killer heat waves and stronger hurricanes, delegates who have seen the report said Thursday….

That means they agree that there is a 90 percent chance that global warming is caused by humans.

We are the cause, which means we are the solution. The time to act is now!

In anticipation of the Fourth Assessment Report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out this Friday, the urgency of climate change continues to explode in the national debate. Check out ClimateProgress on Studio B with Shepard Smith discussing the report’s expected findings.